The city attacks graffiti in this area with a bewildering ferocity. Someone pointed out that as a gateway to Parkridge, maybe the city wants the underpass to look nice. Maybe, but demoralizing lengths of empty concrete walls do nothing to ...

JC’s Market at 514 North Olive Street has been owned and operated for 39 years by J.C. Warwick, a quiet man who describes himself and his business as “pretty low-key.”

Joon and Tae (not their real names) spent the past year hitchhiking across the U.S. and Canada. Tae, 23, is the gregarious one, with a knack for diffusing awkward situations. Joon, 22, is quiet, stoic; she seems to take everything ...

Roosters, still prohibited in the city, are a dead giveaway of an illegal flock. Some mornings I hear the crowing of illicit roosters while sipping coffee on my porch—homey yet exotic in their anachronistic existence in Fourth and Gill.

I hear a lot of nice things about Three Rivers Market lately, and one of them is how good they are to their bicycling customers. In addition to TRM’s bright green bike racks placed right by the door of their ...

Noonie is Willard “Noonie” Joiner, Hiscock’s friend since childhood. Joiner, a 56-year-old stroke survivor, rides the bus every day but Sunday. The bus stop Joiner uses most often is located along a weedy stretch of road. There was no shade, ...

The most satisfying playgrounds don’t come in a box and can’t be picked out of a catalog.

Just off the Island Home Greenway near the airport, a tulip poplar juts out over a murky backwater of the Tennessee River. Someone, or maybe several people over time, have nailed short lengths of 2x4s along the trunk, classic tree-house-ladder ...

Love’s Spring flows from the small hillside between Love’s Creek Road—a narrow, twisty highway off Rutledge Pike—and the banks of Love’s Creek. People say Love’s water tastes better than any expensive commercial bottled water.

First Creek is a huge entity twisting through our lives that we have forgotten about, that we do not see. From satellite view, it looks like a gigantic snake lying disturbingly close to my house.

Mead, Fort Dickerson, Mascot—these three quarry lakes are Knoxville’s best swimming holes.

In Knoxville we are surrounded by water. On a map the entire city is crisscrossed and spotted with blue, but to someone hoping to swim or wade, these blue marks are misleading. I’ve spent the summer exploring Knoxville’s rivers, creeks, ...

On a typical Sunday in early summer, I am walking with my family to Three Rivers Market. As I pass the paved and fenced abandoned lot behind Broadway Carpets, a splash of color catches my eye. A few vibrant wildflowers ...

On the First Friday of July, traveling artists Jim Clark and Primrose Coke parked their 1959 fire-engine-red Shasta camper near Java in the Old City, taped a hand-lettered sign to a light pole, and opened the doors of Bonanza Jellybean, ...

Even people who keep their front lawns obsessively tidy tend to let their back yards go a little wild. So the alleys, free of the monoculture of well-groomed lawns, are where the wild edibles thrive. Where the wild animals hide ...